Album leaf

Qian Hui'an

c. 1875

Ink and color on paper

Minneapolis Institute of Art

Two men in a boat on the water, one holding a fan and the other rowing. Baskets of fruit are in the boat. For this leaf, the artist shows a boat just as its oarsman poles it into view. An old gentleman sits in the prow, gazing into the distance. His hat is of a kind associated with Su Shi, a renowned Northern Song poet and statesman and also a popular theme of Chinese painting, but it would probably be a mistake to think that the leaf illustrates any particular poem by the poet. Rather, the Su Shi reference turns the passenger into an emblem of poetic sensibility. It is a painting of so-called yuyin (“reclusion in a fishing boat”), a theme concerning eremitism rather than fishing. Those seen on boats are not fishermen but scholar-reclus